‘But it doesn’t matter, a lot of our listeners won’t know that much about the games either. So we’ll know that if I get it, they’ll get it too.’

‘But why would someone listen to a podcast if they don’t know anything about the thing they’re talking about?’ Snazz asked.

‘I really don’t know but they do,’ I replied. ‘Why did I spend two hours watching nineteen-year-old makeup artists bitch each other out on YouTube last night? I barely know how to put on mascara. People are weird these days.’

Said the woman to the guinea pig.

‘Can I have my mates on the show?’

‘Why don’t you send me a list of people you think would be good co-hosts and I’ll get in touch with them,’ I replied. ‘But we do need to do it fairly quickly if we’re going to record the first episode at WESC.’

I heard what I took to be an agreeable sniff from underneath the mask before Snazz turned his chair around, picked up another controller identical to the one on the bed and fired all three screens back into life.

‘’K,’ he said, his back to me once again. ‘I’ll ask ’Ronica.’

A clammy sense of dread washed over me as I watched him barrel headfirst into battle, eviscerating an alien horde with nauseating realism. My career, my livelihood, depended on this rodent-headed child. He didn’t need the money, he could drop out at any time. If he quit tomorrow, he’d still have enough cash to keep himself in guinea pig heads until the day he died. Maybe I should start a gaming channel. Computer games for the woman that knew nothing. I was clever, I’d taught myself how to program Mum’s Sky+, how hard could it be? And then I felt myself throw up in my mouth as Snazz sliced open a screaming lizard man, green guts spraying onto the screen.

Maybe not.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

‘Anyway, it was completely insane,’ I told Patrick as I tore back up the motorway. ‘Wait until I tell you about the fish tank—’

‘I can’t talk right now but I can’t wait to hear about it,’ he replied, his voice crackling over the Bluetooth speaker in the car. ‘When am I seeing you?’

My eyebrows knitted together as I mentally checked the date. ‘Aren’t we having dinner tonight?’

‘Oh shit, we are,’ Patrick groaned. ‘I’m so sorry, I just this second said I’d meet my publisher. He wants to go over the chapters I was working on last week. Can I meet you after?’

‘After’s OK,’ I said, annoyed at myself for feeling so disappointed. The man had to work, didn’t he?